Ads

Julianne Moore will play Sarah Palin in HBO Films’ “Game Change,” an adaptation of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann’s book about the 2008 presidential election.

“Game Change,” written by two political reporters, describes the 2008 presidential election from a personal angle— “an intimate portrait of the candidates and spouses who stood a reasonable chance of occupying the White House,” states the New York Times. Sounds sexy, right?

“Game Change” continues Hollywood’s compellingly awkward new trend of producing memoirs of powerful public figures while they’re still in their heyday, like “The Social Network.” Moore, and the rest of the class to a lesser degree, will have the same challenge as Jesse Eisenberg—portraying a famous, divisive person who is still alive and very much in the public eye. The NY Mag profiles will be amazing, and I can’t wait for them to meet up and make uncomfortable jokes on a 2012 episode of “SNL.”

I’d imagine that Moore will be able to pull off a pretty sympathetic performance of the political maelstrom. The actress has proved capable of covering both ends of the sanity spectrum—from her role as an esoteric, baby-hungry heiress in “The Big Lebowski,” to a sexually frustrated lesbian mom in “The Kids are All Right”—and I’m sure she’ll have to call both of those capabilities for this role. Palin is a figure that many relate to, but as the book divulges, staff members assigned to Palin during the campaign discussed a “threatening possibility: that Palin was mentally unstable.”

And while it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Tina Fey or Sara Benincasa impersonating Sarah Palin, it will be refreshing to see someone portray her in a manner that isn’t strictly mocking.

It will also be interesting to see who gets cast as the Clintons, Obamas and McCains (Bryce Dallace Howard as Bristol? Blake Lively as Meghan?). But the choice of Julianne Moore to play Sarah Palin must have been a big one. In the end, Palin wound up being a more significant game changer in the political climate than anyone in 2008, possibly including Obama.